With the Tokyo High Court overturning the 2014 Shizuoka District Court decision to reopen the trial of Iwao Hakamada for murders committed in 1966 — over which he had already been kept behind bars for 48 years until his release four years ago — the 82-year-old Hakamada will likely have to wait for still longer before a judicial conclusion on his retrial bid. Given the split decisions by the lower courts, the Supreme Court, to which his defense counsel plans to appeal, needs to carefully — but promptly, given Hakamada's advanced age — examine the case.
In postwar Japan, court decisions have been made to reopen the cases of six death-row inmates. Of the six, Hakamada is the second one whose retrial decision was later reversed — after Masaru Okunishi, who was sentenced to death over the 1961 fatal poisoning case in Nabari, Mie Prefecture. The Nagoya High Court in 2005 decided to reopen Okunishi's trial — a decision withdrawn the following year by the same court following prosecutors' challenge. Okunishi died at the age of 89 at a medical prison in Tokyo in 2015 — while his ninth retrial plea was being processed. The four others were found innocent in their retrials.
Hakamada was arrested over the murders of a family of four in Shimizu, Shizuoka Prefecture. Then an employee of the family's miso-making business, he confessed to the crime following lengthy police interrogations, but pleaded not guilty in court. The Shizuoka District Court ruling in 1968 that sentenced him to death was finalized by the Supreme Court in 1980.